pfft.

n.  a sudden ending, as discussed in Everything Scrabble by Joe Edley and John Williams.

Pfft.

n.  a taunting nickname, insinuating that someone is flatulent.

<“Did you hear that, Pfft?  I am not afraid of you!”  ...  “Pfft?  You call me Pfft?”  ...  “Pfft, sometimes I think of your name as Pfft-Pfft, or even Pfft-Pfft-Pfft. ... Sometimes I call you Pfft-Pfft-Pfft-Pfft, or even Pfft-Pfft-Pfft-Pfft-Pfft.”  ...  “Why do you call me Pfft?”  “Because of the sounds that so often come from your backside.”  —Sue Pope, Jexicus: One Soul’s Journey.>

pfft.

n.  a void; nothing.

<Pfft occulted.  Nothing having stirred.  —Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels.> <Sei Shonagon could see somebody beheaded right in front of her and it’s like, pfft, there’s no connection between her and that person.  —Janet Fitch, White Oleander: A Novel.>

n.  a whimper at the moment of creation, unlike the massive explosion in the “big bang” theory.

<[Cosmologist Alan Guth] contends that the universe, “not with a bang so much as with a pfft, ... ballooned accidentally out of the endless void of eternity, from a stillness so deep that there was no ‘there’ or ‘then,’ only possibility.”  —Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, Second Edition.>

- END OF PREVIEW - To read more, see the "Search Inside" feature at Amazon.com